Fantasia Fragmental

If the color from today's flowers
weeped with sound,
this quiet evening on the avenue
would crash like some big bang gig.
The colors condensed the winter over,
distilled and drenched and dumped
into cavernous, smelly whiskey barrels
swarming with bees.
A yellow jacket searches
for a place to pitch her tent,
for the long hot busy summer ahead.
The spring rain fills every bowl,
brews and broods.
The yellow jacket screws her mud
to a camellia branch.
The water slows to vinyl,
the beach wood logs tattooed.
Waves like empty wine bottles fall
breaking into the fitful trash truck.

Maybe how we’ve divided the year into only four seasons is too limited. When I lived in LA I thought there were no seasons, but gradually I realized subtle monthly changes. June was the foggy month down by the beach. One day, I rode my bicycle to school and there was snow in the air. I was not dressed for this. I never had much of a coat when living in LA, a jacket, maybe. Maybe a place can be said to have seasons only if the people have special clothes for different times of the year.

The trash truck is there, comes up the street, to pick up the trash – the garbage, compost, recycling, and the glass – which adds to the noise (the trash cans are green, blue, yellow, and gray). The truck is fitful because it jerks up and down the street stopping at each collection of cans, stopping and going in fits, big, clumsy fits, fitful, maybe even frightful, like some hungry dinosaur, or freight-ful, like a run-away rail car. Writers generally make certain assumptions about their audience. I don’t always, but I think trash collection is close to universal in mixing noise and color, so I did not feel the need to add clarity to the line. But if that’s your only question of the entire fragment, not bad. For more on trash collection, check out this previous post on trash. Beckett said he couldn’t listen to a conversation for longer than five minutes without noting inherent chaos. The trash truck offers some stability, in spite of the noise.